Monday, June 26, 2017

*Review* Black Book by Dylan Jones

Sheriff Jack is a no-nonsense soldier from the future, trapped in the Wild West. He must find and protect the sacred Black Book before someone or something else does. The clock is already ticking for humankind, but for Jack the countdown has only just begun.

Review

I was hired to provide post-publication proofreading for this book. The only aspects of the story that I influenced were the spelling and grammar. If you feel that my connection with the book makes my review untrustworthy, so be it, but this is my honest review.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this book, but it ended up being a bit of a trip sort of along the lines of Stephen King's 11/22/63, but with a stronger science fiction storyline. But it was also heavily western. It was kind of a strange combination.

Now I'm a bit ashamed to admit this, but it took me an absurdly long time to figure out how a few of the characters fit into the story, and one of them really should have been obvious. I did finally get there, but it took a while. And trying to puzzle things out kept me thinking about the book even when I wasn't actually reading it.

This story is told from multiple perspectives, and it takes a while to see how the different stories and timelines connect (and there are a couple that are still not clear to me now). I'm also still not entirely sure exactly what is going on in the story (it's the first in a series, so I'm assuming more aspects will start to connect with the next book. But it's a puzzle that I want to figure out, and I really need to determine what the significance of the black book is.

I do wish that the author had opted for a longer book rather than a series at this point (this book is on the short side), but I obviously don't know how involved this tale will end up being, so that wish may change.